News and commentary from the most ominous planet in the solar system. Focusing on real conspiracies, social pathologies, official stupidity and corruption, mass propaganda, the Herd Instinct, Orwellian trends in technology, the growth of the police state, the collapse of civilizations, media-induced hallucinations, killer weather, the surrealistic nature of ordinary life and much, much more. Written and edited by thriller writer Gary Carson.
HOT WIRE NOW AVAILABLE
My second novel, HOT WIRE, is now available in Kindle format from Amazon and Blasted Heath.
A head-on collision of noir crime and political conspiracy thriller, Hot Wire is an excursion into the paranoid territory of the New World Order where conspiracy theory meets chaos theory with explosive results.This is adrenaline entertainment for the 21st Century.
"Hot Wire is a hip, funny, serious and suspenseful novel that brings the great tradition of grifter noir into the present day with the excitement and urgency of the activity its title refers to. Emma Martin is the coolest protagonist crime fiction has produced in a long time."
– Barry Graham, author of When It All Comes Down To Dust
Phase Four Now Available
My apocalyptic technothriller, Phase Four, is now available from Amazon and UK digital publisher Blasted Heath. The novel can be downloaded in a variety of ebook formats, including Kindle format from Amazon. My Spinetingler Magazine article on Phase Four can be read here.
Liam at Troubled Scribe has a great review of the novel here.
Phase Four is now available as a paperback from Amazon.
Recommended Sites
gacarson.com My writer's site with news about current books, interviews and reviews.
Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals Scottish crime writer, agent and Blasted Heath founder Allan Guthrie's long-running crime zine and writer's site.
The Ancient World Review My blog on ancient history. Archaeology news, commentary, fiction, book and movie reviews, and the Ancient World Review podcast if I can ever get my act together.
Comment: This video is over a year old, so the list is probably even larger now than it was then. Needless to say, a terror watch list with over a million names, many of them added simply to meet a quota, is absolutely useless when it comes to providing real security. Obviously, the list only exists for political purposes, i.e., to demonstrate that our glorious leaders are "doing something" about the terrorism which they themselves are doing so much to perpetuate. Welcome to the world of Franz Kafka.
"Police say they are trying to determine how a medical box containing a pair of eyeballs ended up in a trash bin at a gas station in Kansas City." Source: AP.
"Police spokesman Steve Young says a worker at a Conoco station in the city's north called police after finding the cardboard box late Wednesday. The box was labeled, 'Keep refrigerated.'
"Young says police aren't sure if the eyes are human, or whether any crime has been committed. Surveillance video shows two men in a blue Toyota leaving the package on the trash bin."
Comment: Dust mites are microscopic bugs that mostly eat "dander," i.e. dead human and animal skin cells. There are probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions of them living on your mattress (they especially like it when you're lying in bed, making everything nice and warm and moist) and they also like carpets and upholstery. They're generally harmless, but their feces mixed with dead skin cells can cause allergies and asthma attacks in some people.
Mites have plenty of food because there are dead skin cells everywhere. According to Environment, Health and Safety Online, "[t]en percent of the weight of a two year old pillow can be composed of dead mites and their droppings," and "[a]bout 80 percent of the material seen floating in a sunbeam is actually skin flakes." This is pretty nasty stuff and the mites are actually useful because they eat all that dead skin, but if they ever develop a taste for living skin, we're going to have a serious problem.
Comment: Stunts like this are dangerous because they reinforce the popular perception that the living dead aren't real. When the zombie apocalypse actually happens--which it will--everyone will assume that the emergency bulletins are just another hacker prank and many brains will be consumed as a result. Consumed like pancakes by hungry walkers. Ummm...pancakes...
"With this year’s Super Bowl it looks like the Powers That Be realized they could stop pretending that the Super Bowl had become anything but a chance to unite their financially, ethically, and spiritually bankrupted subjects in worship of the militaristic imperial state and into acceptance of the state's push toward complete power over their lives. The whole show has become an embarrassing parallel of the circuses of the late Roman Empire." Source: Lew Rockwell.
Comment: I gave up TV decades ago and I've never followed spectator sports, so I didn't even realize that it was Super Bowl time again until the whole thing was over. These high-tech media extravaganzas have been called the true American religion and they keep getting more expensive and elaborate every year, much like the Roman games which started off as relatively small gladiator matches at funerals and gradually evolved into huge imperial spectacles that sometimes went on for weeks, including things like reenactments of naval battles, massive wild beast hunts, public executions, theatrical productions, gladiator matches and chariot races.
The Super Bowl has turned into a major production with lavish half-time shows featuring the latest lip-synching sensations dressed in leather S&M outfits and surrounded by holograms and dancers flashing occult signals with clouds of mist and flames shooting into the air, but if you ask me the Romans did it better. A lot better. For one thing, the Roman games were paid for by politicians trying to pacify the rabble and make a name for themselves and the Mob always got in for free (though they were separated by sex and class when it came to seating). And the Roman games must have been a fantastic spectacle. For instance,you've got to admit that watching a bunch of Christians get fed to the lions was probably a hell of a lot more entertaining than watching some football player kick a field goal from the thirty-yard line.
The Super Bowl has obviously become a gigantic commercial enterprise, generating millions for the networks and franchises, but it's also turned into a huge propaganda event with lots of flag-waving and support-the-troops rhetoric and multicultural indoctrination designed to re-create a sense of common heritage that no longer exists. Football's a kind of ritualized warfare, of course, but so is chess, so that doesn't mean much. There have been a lot of conspiracy theories circulating about the 2013 Super Bowl, with the usual paranoids speculating about the real reason for the blackout that interrupted the game and the Illuminati hand-signals that Beyonce supposedly flashed while she was singing.
The general idea behind these conspiracy theories is that the Super Bowl is a kind of occult ritual designed to reinforce the national mythology and program the masses to accept the domination of the New World Order. That's so crazy it just might be true, but I really doubt it. The Big Game has turned into a massive commercial production that celebrates patriotism and national unity in a typically superficial way, but this is all pretty standard for the sports scene and doesn't really mean anything. As for the occultish symbols in the half-time shows, they are there--they were obvious in Madonna's 2012 performance--but I think all of this "Illuminati" stuff is coming from the performers themselves, not from the Super Bowl production staff, who probably just hired the biggest pop-singers they could find to increase the game's appeal. The music industry is full of wannabe Satanists and Kabbalists and the like.
If the Super Bowl is some kind of occultish imperial ritual, I don't think it was planned that way, but just emerged from the collision of two radically different American cultures--the super-patriotic commercial culture of Big Sports and the degenerate culture of Big Music with all of its borrowed quasi-mystical satanic and Illuminati-type symbolism. Imagine the Veterans of Foreign Wars teaming up with Pepsi to hire Alice Cooper to do the half-time show at a high school football game. That's the kind of surrealistic weirdness that just emerges naturally from the collective subconscious of the American mind.
"At 53 square miles, Denver International is the third largest airport in the world. It boasts six runways, over 30 million passengers a year and 33,000 acres of expensive coffee shops, duty free and other facilities that you’d expect to be extorted by at an airport; however this is where the normalities end. Within its walls, Denver Airport holds some of the most ominous artwork to ever be publically displayed. In plain view for all to see, the walls are decorated with bizarre murals depicting the burning remains of large cities, dying children of all races, chemical warfare and even a dead dove skewered at the end of a masked Nazi’s machete – hardly a welcoming sight for new arrivals." Source: Sabotage Times.
"As well as artwork that looks like an Illuminati master plan, the airport is also peppered with Freemason symbolism, chemical element abbreviations and even a giant statue of Anubis – the Egyptian god of death. With an interior designer with a penchant for apocalyptic doom and the Orwellian lifestyle, and even tales of underground bases beneath the site, Denver Airport has caused controversy since its creation."
Social Pathology
Christopher Lasch: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
Instincts Of The Herd In Peace And War. --
Noam Chomsky: Media Control, Second Edition: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (Open Media Series)
Gustave le Bon: The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
Apocalypse Culture
Gary Lachman: Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius